Daily Archives: July 16, 2004

Paging Lt. Kafka

Posted on July 16, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

It came via “Yuks,” a jokes mailing list run by Gene Spafford, so at first I didn't think it was for real:

It appears that the US navy spokesman put up to answer journalists' questions about the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is one Lieutenant Mike Kafka. As the article on The Register (www.theregister.co.uk) observes: “Yes, you're reading that correctly. A man named Kafka has been deployed to field questions about a prison where the criminals are only vaguely charged with crimes, can't speak to lawyers and likely will never get out.” Any resemblance this reality bears to an actual fiction is entirely coincidental.

But it's true. (The item is worth reading by the way for its account of how Photoshop got deployed at Guantanamo.)

Posted in Guantanamo | 3 Comments

I Want This

Posted on July 16, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

I need one of these.

Wishlist: the million monkeys at a million typewriters plugin | A Whole Lotta Nothing: I want a MT plugin that will let a select group of my closest, most trusted friends correct typos in text and URLs on my blog posts and republish their changes without my intervention. …

Ideally, I'd like an easy way to say that 4 or 5 people I trust could make edits. And I suppose the edits should be checked before and after, with a certain byte count limit, lest you allow your friends to completely rewrite your post. An email telling me what took place would be nice, but I'd like my friends to go ahead and save their changes, with a way for me to rescue the earlier pre-edit entry just in case.

Actually, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to allow anyone to suggest an edit on the post, sending me an email, with a one-click way to approve or disapprove it. Maybe after a random stranger has properly corrected me half a dozen times, I could elevate their status to having republish rights on the edits so I wouldn't have to approve them anymore.

A plugin like this would basically wiki-ize the weblog world, allowing readers to participate and correct small mistakes.

Yes, please! (spotted via Boing Boing)

Posted in Discourse.net | Leave a comment

We Are So Cosmopolitan

Posted on July 16, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

The BBC reports that the UN says Miami has the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world.

Some 59% of people in the city were not born in the US, the UN Development Programme report said.

…Toronto had the second-highest proportion of foreign-born citizens (44%), while Los Angeles was a close third with 41%.

Another two North American cities – Canada's Vancouver (37%) and New York (36%) – made it into the top five, the report said.

Outside North America, the town-state of Singapore scored highest (33%), followed by Australia's Sydney (31%), Abidjan (30%) in Ivory Coast, London (28%) and Paris (23%).

Plus we've got Shaq. But he was born in Newark.

Posted in Miami | 4 Comments